Why Embracing Discomfort Is Crucial for Success in Fitness and Life

This morning on my commute to the gym I finished listening to an interview with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.

If you don’t recognize the name, she’s the best-selling author of Forever Strong: A New, Science-Based Strategy for Aging Well, a practicing physician, and a huge proponent of the idea that the amount and health of our skeletal muscle is of greater consequence to healthy aging and disease reduction than the amount of body fat we hold.

As you might guess, nutrition and that last point of introduction were among the first topics of discussion during the interview. But very shortly the discussion turned to other topics including inspiring loved ones to begin strength training, attributes that contribute to success in any realm of life, training the attribute of neutrality, raising capable humans (i.e. parenting), and mental friction tools.

It was a fascinating discussion. And one of the mental friction tools, which also happened to be a thread that tied a lot of the other topics together, was simultaneously so simple and so brilliant that I decided I had to share.

First, the context:

Dr. Lyon noticed in both her clinical practice and personal life that neutrality seemed to be one of the primary attributes that contributed to people’s consistency with sticking to a regimen that promoted advancement of their goals.

In her words:

The people that are able to truly be successful—and I’m not talking about monetary, I’m talking about whatever it is your mission is—are those that are neutral. And neutrality, this attribute of neutrality, can absolutely be trained. And it doesn’t need to be trained on these big things… It’s trained in the mundane, and it’s trained day to day. And how do you train it? Well, I have a handful of tricks that we use to train this level of neutrality.

…I’m training you to be more neutral so that you can go out and crush whatever your standards for your life are. Because the more effective you are at being in control cognitively and the more neutral you can be—the more you can take yourself out of it—the more capable you are at showing up and doing the things that are really important and relevant for you.

So how did she recommend training this neutrality?

As she stated, she has a handful of tricks. And all of them relate in some way to becoming more comfortable with being uncomfortable or, as she puts it, “creating [mental] friction”.

Whatever we call it, when we develop the habits of normalizing a bit of discomfort in our lives, recognizing that we didn’t die when the discomfort occurred, and accepting it as a normal part of life, we become more willing to intentionally choose to do other somewhat uncomfortable things that we think will contribute to our eventual success.

And what was her simple (and brilliant) way of developing this habit?

Flipping a coin.

That’s right… flipping a coin.

Basically, you pick something mundane that you enjoy doing. (Her examples included getting Starbucks, shopping online, and playing loud music during exercise.)

Then you flip a coin. If heads show, you get to do the thing (e.g. buy the coffee, click the “buy” button, crank the speaker to 11). But if tails show, you skip it.

It’s that simple. And also that annoying. But, again, that’s actually the point.

As she told the interviewer:

It’s really annoying, and it creates a little resistance. You don’t always get what you want, and you start to build these [mental] muscles. So then when the time comes where that person has to go work out and they really don’t want to, they’ve now built a little bit of internal grit that it’s not the big things, it’s the very small steps that you make that, over time, allow you to overcome any kind of internal resistance to bigger choices.

And as you probably already know from past experiences, overcoming internal resistance to something new, challenging, or scary is quite often both the largest hurdle and the biggest domino.

From my perspective, building that habit is worth at least a quarter.

Putting it into practice

Starting today, consider building or improving your mental muscles by implementing Dr. Lyon’s mental friction coin “trick”.

Every day, or at least most days, pick something mundane that you enjoy but isn’t essential or that perhaps needs to be done but you don’t enjoy doing (e.g. volunteering to do the dishes after dinner, taking an extra turn at changing your newborn’s diaper, waking up early to exercise instead of doing so later in the day).

Then flip a coin, and hold yourself accountable to doing or not doing the task based on what the coin says. You’ll certainly be a little uncomfortable in the short term, but the feeling will become more comfortable with time.

And I’ll bet that developing your neutrality attribute will pay greater dividends than would the quarter you’ll use to do it.